Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Patience at the Pace of Progress

One of my packages arrived today, after 10 weeks of sea and freight transport. Saving something like 20% on postage to do the bulk shipping probably wasn't the smartest of decisions. In that box was a fairly heavy laser printer, which in retrospect was a smart thing to send on. The University charges for each page you send to the printer (as well as every megabyte used in a browser which goes over your daily alottment), I've chalked up close to 100 dollars in charges this month alone. So, with neither the Uni nor the home DSL being cheap, I've got to pick one environment to do work in.

Besides the package shipping being numbingly slow, we've found that the visa process is just driving us insane. Their web application causes more headaches than it saves, and this is coming from someone who works on the Internet for a living.

We've been to their downtown office on average of twice a week, each to try and overcome minute hurdles that prevent us from getting our full permission to live and work in Australia. Maiden names versus assumed names, course work versus research classifications, Canadian versus American, you name it and we've dealt with it. Each require a back and forth misunderstanding and clarification process that drolls on forever. The people in person have been helpful, but powerless at times to speed up (or fix) the system.

I am not sure if it is just us, being impatient Americans wanting to get everything done super quickly, but it might be that things just happen slower here. It's a big country, all the way on the other side of the world and there's just not that sense of urgency or drive to push faster, as cited in the previous post about breakfast traditions.

The trademark here, 'No Worries', could easily mean, 'No Hurries'. This will actually be a welcome mentality when we go have a break.

posted by ncawthon at 8:21 PM